Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Greater New Orleans

Change Region

comments

New Orleans preparing to host its first Startup Weekend business building marathon

propeller incubator opening.jpg

James Anthony Braendel, far left, and his RapJab coworker, Richard Alexander Pomes, discuss work at an open workspace in January near Adam Mejerson, back center, with Fit-Lot, who was talking to Kevin Morgan-Rothschild, far right, of Aquaponic Modula Production Systems. All of them rent space at Propeller, an entrepreneurial incubator for socially conscious businesses that recently opened on Washington Avenue in New Orleans. Propeller will host the first New Orleans edition of the business building marathon called Startup Weekend, on April 5, 6 and 7.
(Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune and NOLA.com)

In a first-time event for New Orleans,
about 50 aspiring entrepreneurs will gather Friday, form teams and spend 54
hours over the weekend molding ideas for new businesses. The event, called
Startup Weekend, originated with a non-profit organization in Seattle and has
unfolded in almost 500 cities across the country and internationally.

This weekend alone features 27 start-up
marathons, including gatherings in New Orleans, Sacramento, Washington, London,
New Delhi and Hong Kong. The local installment is organized in part by Elliott
Adams, entrepreneurship professor at the Loyola University Department of Music
Industry Studies, who said he views it as a mechanism to invite new people to
the entrepreneurship movement in the city.

"There's a lot of great entrepreneurial
events," in New Orleams, Adams said, citing the recently completed Entrepreneur
Week business festival. "One thing about Startup Weekend I really like is it
involves people who don't yet have a company, who are kind of on the periphery
of the start-up scene."

The participants will gather Friday
night at the Propeller social entrepreneurship incubator in Broadmoor, give
one-minute idea pitches, vote on the ideas and group into teams around the
leading proposals. They'll spend the weekend assembling details on how new
businesses based on the ideas would work, guided by a team of coaches. Sunday
night they will make more formal presentations to a panel of judges, who will
award the top three teams packages of donated business services, including legal
work, accounting and office space, to continue developing the plans.

"It's not a conference," Adams said.
"People aren't coming to listen to speeches. It's about building companies."

Adams said a notable component of
Startup Weekend is that it requires participants to gather feedback from
potential customers, through online surveys, talking to other participants who
might be in the target audience, interviewing passersby on the streets or any
other means attendees can concoct in the space of 54 hours. He said that adds a
practical element to the idea-pitching event.

He said Baton Rouge and Shreveport have
hosted Startup Weekends before, but this will be the event's first appearance
in New Orleans. The Seattle-based
organizers of the movement say more than 1,000 such events have taken place
around the world, sparking 8,190 start-ups and involving 100,000 entrepreneurs.